Facebook Suffers ‘Partial Outage’ As User Complaints Mount

Facebook and its photo-sharing subsidiary, Instagram, both suffered partial service outages Wednesday morning, disrupting users and developers on the social media platform.

Both the Facebook and Instagram outages appear to have started just before noon ET, spanning the United States and extending into other parts of the world.

At about 1:45 p.m. ET, the status page for the Facebook Platform, used by developers to build apps on Facebook, changed from reporting health to notifying users of a partial outage that began about an hour earlier.

[Related: Facebook ‘Sorry’ After Massive Breach Affecting Up To 50 Million Accounts]

A Facebook engineer on the company’s server status page said “We are currently experiencing issues that may cause some API requests to take longer or fail unexpectedly. We are investigating the issue and working on a resolution.”

There were no immediate reports of problems with Facebook's enterprise collaboration service, Workplace.

The company took to Twitter to acknowledge the problems: “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps.”

We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

— Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019

CRN has reached out to Facebook for an update and the status of its subscription-based business product.

Downdetector.com, which tracks in real time website outages and problems, showed a spike in reported problems starting before noon ET. Commenters on the site complained of difficulties accessing Facebook in many U.S. cities, as well as in some European regions.

One-third of those more than 10,000 reports on Downdetector were of a "total blackout." Another third complained of problems with the Facebook newsfeed, and the final third had trouble logging in.

Users took to Twitter to report problems.

Some tweeted Facebook notified them of "required maintenance", with a message that said it would be working again in minutes.

Others said they could log into their accounts, but had trouble uploading images or updating their personal and professional pages.

Instagram: down

Facebook: down

Twitter : pic.twitter.com/qdKZcssYRv

— Elliot Menzies (@17menzies17) March 13, 2019

Being a digital media manager when Facebook does down. #facebookdown #instagramdown pic.twitter.com/dsKXYVa4i6

— thenatefletcher (@thenatefletcher) March 13, 2019

Facebook and Instagram down, so I’m opening twitter out of desperation! #facebookdown

— StoneBlossoms Jewelry (@CathyEnright1) March 13, 2019

Facebook, the world's largest social network, suffered two outages last November, and had another one before that in August.